Freight Broker Sales Process

We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our training.  Stacking the deck to make it harder to fail, goes a lot farther than trying to rely on willpower.  In this blog we’ll show you how you can setup systems to make it easier to hit your sales goals and close more customers.  

How you structure your sales process is one of the core activities to growing your book of business.  Without it, you will not succeed in this industry.  In all the years I’ve been in sales, almost every single person that’s failed, did so for the same reason.  They didn’t pickup the phone enough.  They didn’t make enough calls.  And they didn’t touch enough prospects.  I’ve met 1 individual that made his calls consistently for almost a year and didn’t make it.  And that person went on to become a top 1% producer in another sales role.  Logistics just didn’t fit them.  

We’re going to discuss what you can do to make it easier to hit those daily or weekly sales call goals. If your typical daily goal is 70 sales calls. And that takes you the better part of 6 hours.  When you don’t have a handful of available hours it becomes very easy to just say the hell with it.  I’ll get my calls in tomorrow.  Instead reduce the scope of work. Meaning maybe you only have 35 minutes free today because you had a fall out on a load and you spent most of the day calling carriers to recover it.  Take your goal of 70 and reduce it to 10 or 15 calls.  Why?  Because the “bad” days are more important than your good days. If you show up on the difficult days, even if it’s less than you hoped for, you maintained the habit.   It counts for a lot!  Now the only thing you need is more time.  And you’ll likely have it the next day.  

Next, reduce as much friction as possible.  Meaning, make it easier on yourself to succeed.  Eliminate distractions.  Turn off the tv.  Close your internet browser and put your phone in the drawer.  The less things that get in your way.  The more likely you are to hit your goal.  

3rd, prepare your leads at a separate time from calling your leads.  We repeat this over and over on our channel.  It’s very difficult to become efficient at doing many things at once.  If you were going to learn how to shoot a basketball, you wouldn’t learn how to dribble and pass at the same time.  You would stand in one place and have a friend or coach feed you the ball over and over and over again.  Why?  Because you’re holding all of the other variables constant as you learn how to put the ball over the rim and ultimately into the hoop.  It’s the same here.  Doing research is it’s own task and should be treated as such.  The more time you spend on that task, the faster you will get at it.  And making sales calls utilizes a different part of our brain.  So making calls over and over again helps you improve all of the things you need to work on, your tone, rate of speech, what you say, how the gatekeepers or prospect responds and how to handle objections.

A good rule of thumb is to have at least 200 sales leads researched before you begin making your calls.  Once you start dialing you should be both qualifying, asking enough questions to determine that there is an actual need for your services.  And disqualifying, meaning you learned enough to determine that there isn’t a need.  As you eliminate prospects that aren’t a fit, you should be replenishing them.  You won’t be calling the same numbers every day, so you’ll also want to add about 50 leads per week until you have about 400.  That’s a sufficient pipeline of leads to close at least 1 or 2 customers per month over time.  Remember that it takes on average 8-12 conversations with shipper before they become a customer.  So don’t get frustrated when your first call doesn’t end in a sale.  It’s a long game.  And those that reach the top, play it that way.

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